”Frankie Fitzgibbons is a demure and docile small-town New Englander, 45 years old, not long widowed, who one day goes bananas and begins to take over the world. I say ‘goes bananas,’ but the first symptom of her disorder is a kind of bewildering (to others) supersanity: a fierce eloquence, a white-hot clarity of mind. It comes upon her suddenly, Pentecostally almost, while—in the course of her duties as home loan officer for the Parish Bank—she is on the phone with a woman who has been falling behind in her mortgage payments. ‘If you’re looking for a sympathetic ear,’ snaps Mrs. Fitzgibbons, hitherto a reliable provider of just that, ‘you’re barking up the wrong tree.’ Her new voice rings out, loud and muscular with cliché, turning heads, taking no crap. She has been reborn.” Läs recensionen i Slate

”‘Fat City’ is old slang for prosperity and advantage—the good life. If you’re in Fat City, you’re in luck. But the phrase is wry irony as the title of a novel that has stunned and mesmerized successive generations of readers since its publication in 1969. This month New York Review Books brings out a handsome new paperback edition of Leonard Gardner’s sole novel, a slim, taut book that has earned its status as a classic by dint of its immaculate, evocative prose, a compassionate but dour view of the human condition, and the absolute credibility of its depiction of the sport of the busted beaks.” Läs recensionen i Slate

”While the cover bills it as ‘a confessional L.A. novel,’ Eve’s Hollywood is less a straightforward story or tell-all than a sure-footed collection of elliptical yet incisive vignettes and essays about love, longing, beauty, sex, friendship, art, artifice, and above all, Los Angeles. […] Babitz seems to know everyone (a quick Google search informs you she slept with Jim Morrison and posed naked playing chess with Marcel Duchamp), and Eve’s Hollywood reads like an elegant and elevated form of gossip that doesn’t get old – even when you already sort of know the story and many of the famous people here are fictionalized.”
– Deborah Shapiro

”In Sleepless Nights a woman looks back on her life—the parade of people, the shifting background of place—and assembles a scrapbook of memories, reflections, portraits, letters, wishes, and dreams. An inspired fusion of fact and invention, this beautifully realized, hard-bitten, lyrical book is not only Elizabeth Hardwick’s finest fiction but one of the outstanding contributions to American literature of the last fifty years.”
– NYRB